Genes Determine Intelligence

Yet another scientific study—this time in Australia—has proven that intelligence is genetic and has nothing to do with environment, confirming that the liberal worldview of “human equality” is built on a deliberate lie. The new study found that math and reading skills are at least 75 percent genetic, writing skills are 50 percent genetic, and the school environment only contributes less than 5 percent of any person’s abilities.

As reported by Australia’s public broadcaster, SBS (Special Broadcasting Service), the new research has definitively shown that “genes are more important in explaining differences in academic performance than teachers and schools.” The study was based on wide-ranging research into the academic performance of twins mapped out in the Australian Department of Education’s National Assessment Program—Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) tests.

NAPLAN is made up of tests in the four areas (or ‘domains’) of reading, writing, language conventions (spelling, grammar, and punctuation), and numeracy, and is run at the direction of Australia’s Education Council.

Professor Brian Byrne. The research has been conducted by Emeritus Professor Brian Byrne and colleagues at the Centre of Excellence for Cognition and its Disorders, and the University of New England.

The research will shortly be published in full, with much of the peer review process complete, SBS reported, although some parts of the study were published last year (“Validity of large-scale reading tests: A phenotypic and behaviour–genetic analysis,” Australian Journal of Education, April 2015 vol. 59 no. 1 5–21). That report said that “Performance on large-scale reading tests and individually administered tests was moderately to substantially heritable and the same genes contributed to performance in both types of test.”

The SBS said that Byrne and his colleagues were allowed access to around 3,000 sets of twins and were able to look at their academic performance in literacy and numeracy NAPLAN tests in school years 3, 5, 7, and 9.

“The results were surprising,” SBS reported, “Families, teachers, and schools had a much more modest contribution when explaining the difference in academic performance of children in the same grade or class,” and the “majority of difference between students’ abilities in literacy and numeracy were instead attributable to their genetic make-up.” Byrne said the involvement of twins in his research has been incredibly important. “They are the perfect natural experiment. We use their data to extrapolate across the wider population.” Because twins share a large portion of their genes—and almost always share the same environment growing up, a comparison of their differences and similarities reveals whether certain behaviors and abilities are the product of nature or nurture. For example, he found that twins—whether identical or fraternal—performed equally similar to one another even when they were in different classes and schools. In other words, people with high intelligence have high abilities, and people with low intelligence have low abilities—and these traits are directly inherited from their parents, and not “caused” by the school which they attend or any other social factor. “Writing skills were the least influenced by genetics—only about 50 percent,” SBS continued, adding that “genetic influences on reading, spelling, and mathematics abilities were found to be between 50–75 per cent.” “Genes are the things that are, for the most part, driving differences among children, and not different teachers, or even different schools,” Byrne told SBS Insight’s Jenny Brockie, during filming of a television show feature on twins. Byrne told SBS that his “findings undermine the idea that a really, really big player in how well children are doing is teacher qualifications and a teacher’s education.”

He added that the findings were important “for the education system to understand that genes matter.” Approached for comment by SBS, Chris Watt, Federal Secretary of the Independent Teachers Union, said Byrne’s “research confirms what teachers have known for a long time: that some children are born with advantages, when others are not, and there needs to be greater resources that allow them to factor those differences into their teaching. At the end of the day, a school can only do so much,” he said. The findings, SBS pointed out, backed up earlier research done in the UK, where academics looked at the end of year General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) exam results of pairs of identical and non-identical twins. The nationwide study included a sample of 11,117 16-year-olds and found that their genetic makeup may matter more than their teachers, schools, or home environments.

RECOMMENDED READING: IQ and Race: The Complete Overview

Featuring the work of Henry Garrrett, Arthur Jensen, J. Phillipe Rushton, Richard J. Herrnstein, Charles Murray, Richard Lynn, Tatu Vanhanen, and others. The April 2012 discovery by an international team of scientists of the gene HMGA2 which determines brain size and intelligence, has firmly established the supremacy of the “nature” or racial-determinant view of intelligence and achievement over the leftist “nurture” argument. This book reviews and summarizes all the major and influential works on IQ and race published since 1980. Starting with the full text of Professor Henry Garret’s classic IQ and Racial Differences, the remainder of the book is given over to summaries of:

– Harvard psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s bestseller The Bell Curve;
– Professors J. Phillipe Rushton and Arthur Jensen’s ground-breaking “Thirty Years of Research on Race Differences in Cognitive Ability” as published by the American Psychological Association;
– Professor Rushton’s book Race, Evolution and Behavior;
– Professors Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen’s IQ and the Wealth of Nations with its global IQ charts; and – Full details of the 2012 HMGA2 gene discovery report.